Objective: To consider the development of your skills in using digital technology across the 2 years and the effect or impact this has had on your creativity/cultural expectations

Through the two years that I have spent learning to use digital technology my skills have become more efficient and I have gained a greater knowledge and greater expectations of products of digital technology.

 Digital technology in the post modern era is all around us. This is often in the forms of social media and networking on mobile phones that have applications. We use digital technology all the time without being aware that that’s what it is. For example a person may take a picture of them self and use the editing tools available to them on the application to test and put together a product before sharing it with the world. It’s this accessibility to digital technology that allows us to be creative at all times.

Digital technology made it very easy to do research when it came to producing the different horror products in A2. Using the internet to research a questionnaire was used and sent to many different members of the target audience and they answered using different means of social media. This spanned from iMessage to Whatsapp, to Survey Monkey and more. This made the research easier as i was able to create the questionnaires and have them answered honestly by a large group  of people without even leaving my seat. During post production I used Final Cut Pro to edit the trailer for the clips that we had filmed. While we had a storyboard and an animatic that I used as a guide there was an element of experimenting with different effects and music when putting together the clips, audio, effects, etc.

During the creation of the AS preliminary task there was a small amount of digital technology used to research what a magazine should look like. This was through using search engines on a computer to search images of the genre of magazine to understand visually the codes and conventions. We would then take and apply a number of these to the college magazine to make sure that it shows a basic understanding. During getting the images for the magazine the pictures were very simple and used iPhones to collect the images. As the research was already very limiting the creativity couldn’t flourish so the pictures were purposely very standard to avoid risk at doing something wrong as for the preliminary task it was unnecessary. I used a combination of Photoshop and Adobe inDesign. 

The Enthrallment Trailer

Post Production Essay Consider the development of your skills in using Post Production across the 2 years and the effect or impact this has had on your creativity/cultural expectations

Post production is the evaluation of the product and the assessment of the skills that were either had by the student before production or developed through the production process and then used to put together the materials acquired to form a final product. Post production is much more thorough and expansive as many more hardware technologies and software programmes were used to create the finished products. This is because I was creating a magazine FC, poster, and film trailer. During filming it is important to follow a set shot list and shot schedule to ensure that everything that is needed to make a cohesive trailer with good continuity is created. However there is an element experimentation that is needed to create something creative and unique that will capture my audience more. This is why we decided to include the use of low tracking shots to create a more dynamic horror trailer which gave a creative twist which we had not initially planned for. This also ties into the aesthetics of the front cover, trailer, and poster. I had to experiment with the colour that we were going to use essentially for our house style in A2 and ensure that it is consistent in all 3 products.

My preliminary task was used as a way of developing and displaying my early photoshop and indesign skills. This was a critical period in my basic knowledge and initial use of skills that would underpin my work for the two years. During this time i wasn’t able to create something hyper realistic as i simply didn’t have the skills to create anything of such high quality. However this is a time period and task that had the highest level of experimentation as the criteria was broad enough that I could really be creative and see what would work for a college magazine.

Before the preliminary task I had no skills on photoshop. So during this time I learned how to remove green screen, layer photos, crop images, etc. Once again it wasn’t possible to create at this point a product with hyper reality as I didn’t have such developed skills but it was the skills I learned here that underpinned the aesthetic look for my Music Magazine.

I used two different programmes from my AS preliminary task and my A2 horror trailer. Despite this there were a number of skills that I learned early on and developed through the year and used to create a good A2 trailer. For example learning about house styles for magazines and how to present them is a skill that i had to use throughout my trailer. I chose a set colour palette that i would use to convey the same wanted mood through out the trailer and used colour grading and editing to change the hue of most to all of the shots and title slates in the trailer to. This created an altogether more cohesive and well rounded product that on face value looked like the desired product and similar to real life examples. So while I didn’t have much skills or experience at the beginning of the two years I used a lot of experimenting to create my product and through the use of the skills that I learned I created an aesthetically pleasing product. So this meant simply putting a filter over an image or sequence and seeing if that would work as i had previously not learned if it would work or not and then using the one that turned out the best.

In conclusion my understanding of post production skills has helped me create products much faster as i have consolidated and understood my work and what works. However a down side of this could be that i’m less likely to experiment as much and be as creative as i have become used to a certain way of doing things and following set conventions. On the flip side it could also be said that the better skills will allow me to make a better application of the creativity that i have and produce an all around better product.

Research and Planning Essay Response

At the beginning of Year 12 I had to complete an AS Preliminary Task for creating a college magazine. The goal of this exercise was to simply display that i had the skills to create a magazine by following the basic conventions of a magazine. This exercise was in no way creative as nothing new was created, as a creator I simply copied something that already existed to prove to a moderator that i had the skills necessary to create a music magazine. During this period i had only just started to learn how to use the software needed to create the music magazine so my means of channelling my creativity weren’t fully optimised. This meant that my creativity was greatly limited by my lack of skill.

When making the AS media music magazine it was obvious that for the research side of things we would have to look at a wide variety of music magazines. Seeing as i was looking to make a hip-hop magazine I had to look at a number of other hip-hop magazines to see how the basic conventions were used and to understand the conventions that are specific to that genre. This  was very important as it helped my magazine’s stylistic choices when it came to things such as house style or colour or position of the masthead. It was this understanding that i gained from looking at the many examples that helped me understanding why you would choose black instead of red for text colour for example for body text. The level of knowledge gained from research allowed for me to develop my magazine creating skills.

When creating my A2 media film trailer there were a number of things that had to be factored in to Research and Planning. For example to create a horror trailer I first needed to know a great deal about the genre. This is why I did Horror genre research that allowed me to understand what went into the editing, sound, mis-en-scene, etc of a horror film.  I then applied this knowledge by looking at a number of iconic horror characters and seeing how this knowledge applied to each one of them in their respective films. It was this information that allowed me to create a suitable treatment for the horror trailer. This treatment was filled with many of the codes and conventions when mentioning key scenes of the film, making fir a better piece of production that would cater to fans.

My planning skills have developed greatly from the production of my music magazine to the production of my horror trailer. This is likely because my research skills have developed more which underpins the planning process. With greater knowledge of the conventions that I need to include and each of their purposes I can plan a better final product. This may for example be the rule of thirds when creating a front cover and that the purpose is to position different aspects of the magazine at the different points that the eye would go to first. More research was done in horror audience research in A2 and I was able to create an even more appealing horror magazine as we had asked actual people from our demographic what features they liked and included them in the appropriate parts of the magazine taking into account the already learnt information on the rule of thirds.

As a post modern media producer it is very difficult or almost impossible to come up with something original. However this doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to be creative in this era. You can make use of already existing text and bring them together to create something new. This is known as intertextuality. It’s the synthesis of something new from the reworking and remodelling of the pre-existing. 

Creativity Notes

Creativity is the synthesis of the new and the reworking and remodelling of the old. Creativity is often thought to be only the creation of completely new ideas, however this isn’t the case. It is taking the inspiration from past work and creating something with it. Creativity is often the product of a person simply expressing themselves.

Most people believe that everyone is born with an innate creativeness, this creativity is explored through childhood and is thought to be the most vivid and expressive at this point in the average person’s life. This may be due to the lack of knowledge that that individual has at that time in their life so they explore all the possibilities and unanswered questions. As a person grows older some people believe that the creativity is lost, this may be due to them gaining knowledge. Oppositionally some people believe that you never lose the creativity but you’re socially conditioned to suppress it.

Technology in the Post Modern era has brought about even more creativity in the everyday person. It has becoming increasingly easier to express yourself with many media and platforms to show your creativity. Through this people have been more exposed the creativity from others making almost everywhere you look on the internet using your technology of choice a source of inspiration to draw from, remodel and create something of their own.

Copying another piece of work isn’t creative at all. An example of this was last year during the AS magazine coursework we had to create a preliminary task magazine. We didn’t attempt to be creative at all as we simply copied magazines to understand the structure and layout of a magazine front cover and content page.

Intertextuality can be described as the way in which existing text can influence the creation of new text. One example would be how alien is a essentially when boiled down ‘Jaws in space’. It takes heavy inspiration from the Jaws movie and many sci fi thrillers and has through the use of intertextuality created something new. A horror film.

Creativity and Originality aren’t the same thing. You don’t have to be original in order to be creative. Being creative is making something that didn’t’ exist before.

Evaluate Your own Trailer and other media text in relation to Audience

The content of media text and the way that it is presented to an audience can have different effects. There are some ways in which the text can be handled or understood by an audience in an active way or opposing in a passive way.

One model of how media text affects an audience in the hypodermic needle model. Like the name suggests the audience is effected in a passive way in which they aren’t able to accept or interpret the text as their own but instead the message is injected into the mind of the audience by powerful syringe-like media.

Another theory is reception theory. This is the idea that the text is coded by the producer and is meant to be decoded by the audience. This is thought to be an active way in which the audience receives text as they are meant to come to their own conclusion and understanding of the text presented to them. There are three different ways that they can decode the text. They can decode it in the dominant or preferred manner. This is when the audience understands the text the way that the director and producer wanted it to be decoded almost the same way that it was coded. Another way is the negotiated decoding in which the audience accepts, rejects or refines elements of the text in order to create a better or more widely accepted decoding of the text for social and political reasons. The final decoding is oppositional in which the dominant coding is recognised but rejected altogether for cultural or political reason. In our trailer we coded a subtext into the deaths of the teenagers to give a moralist take on their rebellious actions and how they would be punished for them. It’s likely that the audience decodes our trailer in a dominant or preferred way as the slasher genre is known for its standing on teenage stock characters and how they are killed for their actions

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The Catharsis theory states that by watching certain types of media a person loses the urge to carry out or imitate such actions. For example are person may find comfort in watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre as they don’t feel that they would need to go out and do it themselves. They gain emotional release from seeing violence. In our trailer way include some scenes of violence which to our audience may be important in their choice to watch the full film as it would cleanse or purge their desire for violence of their own. It’s in this belief that horror films are somewhat therapeutic and are important in their ability to make people less aggressive as watching violence is a way of releasing those emotions.

Representation Essay

People are represented in different ways through characters in the media. Horror texts have a different ways of representing groups of people. Each character stands for a group of people and the way they act, dress, the way they’re viewed from the perspective of the audience add to a representation of that group of people.

One example would be how children are represented in horror films. They are often the subject of some sort of possession. This is meant to represent the way in which the children are about to or are going into puberty and in this time they are meant become uncontrollable ‘demons’. They lose their innocence but not due to their own will but due to factors that they have no control over. Examples of this would be The Exorcist. Other examples of possession come in movies such as Evil Dead where teenagers stay in a cabin in the woods. In this case they are doing drugs, drinking, engaging in sexual activities when one of them becomes possessed.

Humans can also often be represented almost quite literally (especially in horror films) as monsters. This is to represent the monster within. This can be done through a contrast of monsters and humans. A usually scary monster such as a zombie can be humanised and be made to have feelings and be denoted as relatable to the audience, making them the good guy. When opposed with humans that are trying to destroy the monster the audience then start s to question who the ‘monster’ really is. The humans then become the monster of that film. An example of this would be Warm bodies. There are other examples of the monster within. Psycho is a classic example in which a man who would seem to have been a normal member of society goes crazy and becomes a brutal murderer. He as an upbringing that causes him to lose control when his mother passes away. This representation of this character is to represent the monster within all of us and that this monster could be within any of us and that the person next to you could end up being this psychotic killer.

Often in horror text women are portrayed in a misogynistic way. They are represented as more of a sexual object for the viewer’s pleasure than as a character in the story. The way they are filmed is known as the male gaze.  They are objectified and filmed in the way hat men would want to view a sexualised female. On the flip side there is binary opposition with the feminist version of this known as the female gaze which is essentially the same thing but a sexualised voyeuristic view of men to cater to female viewers. The trailer that I was working on did not make use of these representations of characters as we focused mainly on the final girl. The final girl is an innocent virgin character and so the male gaze would be very inappropriate for her.

Stock characters in slashers (The genre of our trailer) are meant to conform to teen stereotypes. The classic roster of stock characters includes the fool, nerd, jock, virgin (final girl), and the slut. These characters minus the final girl all engage in some sort of sexual act or drugs. These character’s sins lead to punishment by some sort of divine character that has unopposable power. The only character in the film with the power to oppose the antagonist is the final girl who uses a phallic object of her own to fight back. Our trailer shows other characters that have ‘sinned’ being punished for their actions and the only character that survives is the final girl.